


Everybody had a show

by Splinter



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, During Canon, Gen, Introspection, Road Trips, Set during the movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 20:54:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11814003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Splinter/pseuds/Splinter
Summary: There’s so much Toast can’t recall, or never knew. She wants to rage at the time stolen from her: all the things she could have been doing, could have been learning. She would spit on Joe, for taking that from her.





	Everybody had a show

Toast watches Furiosa avidly. 

The other woman’s skill and assurance is both new and familiar. From her own childhood, before she was taken, Toast remembers seeing her mother and other women firing guns, driving, trading. She remembers learning how to do those things, wonders how rusty her knowledge will be, after hundreds of days in the Vault. She knows she can drive, she knows it, but she also knows she can’t drive like that. She’s never been behind the wheel of anything more powerful than a car, never shot anything bigger than a handgun. 

If they come out of this alive, she could ask Furiosa to teach her. She knows they’re unlikely to get the chance. Since the muzzled feral slowed them down, the armada has been hanging on the horizon like another sandstorm, eating up the narrow lead they’d won.

So she soaks up everything she can: what Furiosa is doing, how she holds herself, how she is. She wasted her chance to observe the negotiations with the feral wastelander: she’d been too angry. Underneath, she knows she’d been too scared. She remembers that Furiosa had pitched her voice quietly, matter-of-fact, but not how the argument had gone. 

Toast is hidden in the hold during the confrontation with the rock riders, but if she and her sisters can’t see much, at least she can hear. She notes the way Furiosa keeps mentioning the past agreement, telling them she’s kept her part of the bargain, suggesting that she and the rock riders share the same view of the situation. How did she ever open negotiations? How had she got this far? Toast is not surprised that Furiosa can do confrontation, but her diplomacy is unfamiliar. She’s used to Angharad’s righteous fury and searing logic, to Capable’s peacemaking, but this is something else again. She listens very carefully.

If she can’t ask for lessons, she’ll take every chance she gets. She wishes there were more of them: she hates feeling helpless, stuck in the back of the rig. It makes her irritable and impatient. It’s too much like being trapped in the vault with nothing to do and no way of changing anything. She finds herself sliding back into old dynamics, to her own first reactions to the women who have become her sisters. It had taken her a while to see past her own anger, to see the resilience behind Capable’s softness or the Dag’s apparent detachment. 

When Furiosa thrusts her gun at Angharad, telling her to reload it, Toast can’t tell if Angharad’s blank look is bewilderment at machinery she doesn’t know how to use, or refusal to engage with something she rejects so completely. Either way, it’s infuriating. Toast can’t hold it in any more, snatching the gun and willing herself to remember what to do with the clip.

There’s so much she can’t recall, or never knew. She wants to rage at the time stolen from her: not just captivity and abuse, but all the things she could have been doing, could have been learning. She would spit on Joe, for taking that from her.

What happens next is so fast there’s no time to act, no time for any knowledge she might have. Angharad simply hauls herself out of the seat and out of the door, leaving Toast and Capable scrambling after her, hanging onto her. For one horrible moment Toast wonders if she’s actually throwing herself into the road: they all know Joe would stop for her, for his fertile favourite. She wouldn’t put it past Angharad, who won’t fire a gun but would have no hesitation in setting herself or the whole world ablaze. 

She manages to grab hold of a handful of Angharad’s dress, helping to hold her up as she stares Joe down. Toast is glaring at him, too, stretching up to get a glimpse out of the window as she holds on to Angharad. 

She wishes she had never let go. She wishes she could go back, do it differently. Angharad is in the road and the wastelander won’t turn the rig, though they don’t even know that she’s dead – and worse, Toast knows exactly why he won’t go back, why he won’t take the risk. She can’t tell if Angharad would urge them on, ready to sacrifice herself for their escape, or if she would despise them for their lack of loyalty. Capable, always faithful, is shouting at the feral. Toast can’t process, knows she should weigh in but she’s frozen, stuck and immobile even as her mind goes on calculating the odds.

“Whatever happens, we’re going to the Green Place.” It’s the one thing she’s got to hold on to, and they don’t even know how to find it. She wants to snarl at Cheedo for telling her so. 

Toast is trying to see how the engines are cooled when Cheedo runs off. She hears the scream from behind the rig and starts running, terrified that Cheedo is hurt, that what has already happened to Angharad could have caught up with her youngest sister. She stumbles to a halt when she hears Capable and the Dag urging her to come back. If they weren’t there, of course she would go after Cheedo herself, of course she would. But she tells herself that over a bubble of rage. It’s not until Furiosa shoulders her rifle that Toast spots the motorcycle approaching, realises that this was prompted by an attack.

Back in the rig, she’s twitchy with anger: at her own slowness in reading the situation, at Cheedo’s drama. She won’t admit that she understands the urge to go back, that there might be a single second when the Vault might seem a better bet than this. She doesn’t talk to Cheedo for a while after that.

She’s eager to count bullets, to remind herself of the workings of guns. She knows the wastelander has useful knowledge, but how can he share it when he doesn’t speak?

“We’ve only got four for Big Boy here, so he’s all but useless,” she announces, eyeing him to see how he responds. Nothing. She tries again, pushing harder this time. “But we can squirt off this little pinkie a raunchy 29 times.” That gets her a weary eyebrow lift, glimpsed in the mirror. Nothing more.

The wastelander does show them how to ditch the heavy spare tyres in the night bog, how to wedge the engine plates under the rig, hoping to give the wheels something they can get a purchase on. His instructions are barely verbal – mostly point and grunt – but they’re clear, easy to follow. Toast is starting to see how he and Furiosa achieve their wordless communication, the way they work together as smoothly as the oiled parts of a machine.

She gets her own taste of that when Furiosa asks her to cover the war boy, handing her the gun because she’s needed elsewhere. The handgun is cold and heavy in Toast’s hand, but she gets it: the need to watch reactions, the way that being armed is only half of it. She’d have liked to see Furiosa shooting the lights out of the pursuit, but having something to do is better.

Even knowing that, understanding the satisfaction of doing something, it’s a surprise when the wastelander vanishes into the night. 

“What do you suppose he’s gonna do?” She knows he knows: he was so sure in selecting from their stores, the knife and the explosives. The choice was limited, but he has something in mind.

“Retaliate first,” Furiosa replies, staring after him. It’s strange, the wish to wait for him, for the man who refused to turn back for Angharad.

They busy themselves with moving the war rig, cooling the engines. Toast is running to and fro with more milk when they see the flash in the darkness, hear the thump of a distant explosion. 

When the wastelander returns, he looks feral again, the way he had been under the muzzle. Damaged.

“Are you hurt? You’re bleeding.”

“That’s not his blood.”

Once Furiosa has said it, Toast can see it’s true: the blood is just sitting on his face, smeared rather than flowing from any particular wound. The imperator would recognise battle injuries, but Toast suspects that’s not how she knew. There’s a different kind of kinship between her and the wastelander, a sense of past harm.

There are more hints of that past when they meet the Vuvalini, so similar to Furiosa, and so different. They’re curious where their missing daughter is aloof, though even their openness only goes so far. Toast can’t help reaching for a bullet belt worn by the nearest woman: so many different sizes of ammunition, neatly stored. She gets her hand smacked away, but they laugh afterwards. There’s room to negotiate.

Now there are too many of them to be a single knot of people: the Vuvalini, the wives, Furiosa, the wastelander, the war boy. They break into different groups, conversations starting and stopping as night falls. The Vuvalini might guard their gunbelts, but they’re generous with cloth and jewellery. Toast finds herself laughing at the way Cheedo tries on all the necklaces at once. It’s not until the tension breaks that Toast realises it was still there. She smiles at Cheedo, without strain.

“What about your hair?” she teases. “Nothing in that?” Cheedo pouts, so Toast picks up a woven belt, pops it on her head. She’s joking, but Cheedo promptly does up the ties, turning the fabric into a headband. Her many bracelets rattle and catch in her hair. 

Toast ends up untangling them for her, and straightening the headband while she’s at it. Cheedo gives back just a little of the jewellery. She keeps the headband on. 

The wastelander stays hunched at the edges, not joining any of the little groups. Furiosa is reunited with her own people, except that after her scream she seems even more armoured. Perhaps she’s different in private, in the small conversations she snatches with Melita or the Valkyrie. But the hints of openness have gone, her barriers back up. In the conversations Toast hears, she’ll tell the Vuvalini what happened, but not what she herself has done. It’s all framed as if it had happened to someone else. Toast watches, but can’t make sense of it. She would be proud of escaping, of surviving to defy Joe. 

Toast is still pondering when the Vuvalini Melita passes her a cup of hot tea, brewed in a steel kettle. The cup is chipped but improbably dainty, fished out of motorcycle saddlebag. The kettle goes back on the flame, which reminds Toast that she missed her chance to see how they did that. In the Vault, they had good feeding, but no chance to learn cooking or fire-setting. Melita sits down, quite close as they look over the salt.

Further off, Toast spots the Dag, speaking easily to Keeper. They’re looking through a bag, discussing plants. Toast has no gift with growing things. She’s not sure Angharad did, either, though she couldn’t resist the symbolism of them. There had been huge rows about priorities, about necessary and unnecessary killing. Toast had backed Furiosa’s view; her sisters had been reluctant to acknowledge the brutality of the wasteland outside. Capable, she thinks, had been naïve, but she can’t accuse Angharad of that. Naivety doesn’t scald.

Toast blinks fiercely, tries to concentrate. Sitting with her hot cup should be a moment of respite, but she’s near tears, doesn’t know how to stop it. She’s burned with fury for hundreds of days, and she understands that, knows how to fuel herself with it. Grief is impossible.

Thinking of Angharad, she finds herself thinking of her own mother, of the quarrel they’d had the last day she’d seen her. She pushes it out of her mind, but it keeps coming back. She shakes her head angrily, almost slopping water out of her cup – but only almost. The habit of saving water is still too ingrained for grief to shift it. In the Vault, there had been endless water. Joe had encouraged them to be wasteful with it, liked seeing them spilling something that could have kept a person alive. Guarding it sensibly had been one of Toast’s smaller rebellions. 

She gulps down the tea, even though it’s still too hot. When she looks up, she finds Melita watching her.

The Vuvalini picks up the kettle to refill her cup, lifting it off the tripod. For the first time, Toast notices the ring of stones around the fire, the way it’s half-buried from sight and from the wind.

Her eyes on Toast, Melita holds the kettle off the heat a moment longer, giving her a chance to examine the fire pit more closely. Then she points beyond the pit. It’s dark enough that Toast can’t really see, but eventually she realises there’s a second pit, another hole beyond the fire.

“Airflow,” Melita says. She speaks casually, as if making conversation. The setup conceals and shelters the flame, while giving it air. She and Smith start telling stories about finding fuel in the desert. It’s mostly jokes about what they’ve burned, about what people burned in the Before times, but there’s information there too. Some of it seems like sacrilege: the idea of burning wood, or clothes, or even books, which might be boring but might also contain useful knowledge. 

“Ashes are good for soil, if you can find it,” the Keeper of the Seeds chips in, as she and the Dag come back for tea.

“Some kinds of soil burn,” Melita says, slyly. The Keeper rolls her eyes: it’s obviously an old tease. 

Toast is watching this, too. She and the other wives have lived cramped together for hundreds of days. For all its size, the Vault offered no space at all. They know each other’s moves and buttons, often too well. Toast had been so angry when Cheedo tried to run, hadn’t had the patience to go after her. She’d resented feeling guilty about it. If she tried this sort of joke, there might be a flare-up, or there might be laughter all round. She thinks of her own attempt to tease the wastelander, his refusal to respond. The Vuvalini’s jokes feel like Toast’s own, given room to breathe. It’s a way of being that is both new and familiar.

“You can share Maadi’s bike, when we cross the salt,” Melita tells her. Toast’s heart sinks a little, at being passed on like this. She’s determined to be careless about it, not to show any hurt. 

“I’ll be in the trailer,” Melita adds. “She’s a better driver than I am. You’ll learn more.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm at [lurkinghistoric](http://lurkinghistoric.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr.


End file.
